Artificial interactive dialog systems are an increasingly widespread feature in state-of-the-art consumer electronic devices. For example, modern wireless smartphones incorporate speech recognition, interactive dialog, and speech synthesis software to engage in real-time interactive conversation with a user to deliver such services as information and news, remote device configuration and programming, conversational rapport, etc.
To allow the user to experience a more natural and seamless conversation with the dialog system, it is desirable to generate speech or other output having emotional content in addition to semantic content. For example, when delivering news, scheduling tasks, or otherwise interacting with the user, it would be desirable to impart emotional characteristics to the synthesized speech and/or other output to more effectively engage the user in conversation.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide techniques for determining suitable emotions to impart to semantic content delivered by an interactive dialog system, and classifying such determined emotions according to one of a plurality of predetermined emotion types.